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Monday, March 28, 2016

I
didn’t know Jim Harrison in Hollywood meetings or Paris lunches of many hours
and many courses. I knew Jim and Linda at home, in their old farmhouse down the
road from Lake Leelanau, with their daughters and their friends, their dogs and
cats and gardens and, long ago, Linda’s horse, later, her pet rescued crow. Also, memorably, at the Bluebird in Leland.

When we first met, the Harrisons were driving a car missing one of the back windows, the glass
replaced by cardboard held in with duct tape, a car that exemplified the phrase "winter beater," though they drove it in all seasons. This was before Hollywood money
allowed the remodeling of the old house. Even then Jim told me proudly that
he always kept plenty of good food in the refrigerator and pantry. He might
skimp on other things but never on food. Years later, when a number of friends
were assembled in the house for a dinner party during sweetcorn season, Jim
gave the signal to a handful of us to run out and pick the corn only when the
water in the pot had reached a full, rolling boil.

Was
that the same year that younger daughter Anna was feeling somewhat under the
weather and requested duck broth? Linda observed with a wry smile that the
family food obsessions had “created a monster.” (Not so. Like her mother,
choosing a lightly traveled road, Anna married a poet.) And was that also the
same time – somehow they blend together in memory, mental snapshots from
different years and seasons all jumbled – that I hauled my Correcting Selectric
III from Kalamazoo to Lake Leelanau to type a sheaf of new poems for a book Jim
was putting together?

It’s
true that Jim Harrison lived a big life. What is missing in all the
public obituaries, though, for me – and I realize the public at large might not
care so much -- are the workman, the husband, and the father. I remember older
daughter Jamie’s high school graduation party, with tables set out all over the
front yard at the farmhouse. (Jamie also became a writer.) And I can see Jim,
standing at the kitchen counter in the morning, barefoot, wearing shorts and a loose, untied
bathrobe. There is a cat stalking the counter, and Jim is having his first cup
of coffee and cigarette of the day while discussing the cat and the day’s menu
for lunch with Linda. Soon he will get dressed and go out to the granary, his
office, to spend hours at work, undisturbed.

The
year I took the typewriter to his house to type the poems, we walked out to the
granary together. It felt strange, accompanying the poet to his usually solitary hermitage.
Besides, there were the poems.

“I
feel as if I’ve been reading your diary,” I told him.

“You
have been,” he said.

And
then we worked. No goofing around. When Jim worked, he worked. Two new books
out just this year, Dead Man’s Float (poems) and The Ancient Minstrel (novellas).

We
heard on NPR this morning that Harrison told an interviewer once he was sick of
irony in modern literature and that he would rather take the risk of being
thought “corny” for exploring the full range of human sentiment than “dying a
smartass.” He could be a smartass at times, in social situations, but his
writing came always from the heart, undisguised.

And
he got his work done.

Bless
you, Jimmy! Our world was larger because you were in it and is smaller now
without you and Linda.

Friday, March 25, 2016

Back
in January I reported that I had begun The Tale of Genji, a Japanese work
written by (probably) Murasaki Shikibu, a lady of the court during the Heian
Period (10th to 11th centuries). It’s a long book, about
a thousand pages, and since I didn’t need to finish in time for a group
discussion, I did not keep to a rigorous reading schedule. Consequently, here
it is past the middle of March, and I’m only now midway through.

“Is
it worth the time?” David asked me.

I
told him it’s considered a classic of Japanese literature, was written by a
woman, and that Asian classics have been a sorely neglected area in my reading
life. It’s not terribly difficult book, except for keeping all the names and
relationships straight, and the translator, Edward G. Seidensticker (at least I
presume it was he, though it could have been an editor) provides a list of
principal characters at the front of the book for reference, so I can’t say I’m
struggling. More like dawdling.

In
the beginning I felt about Genji as one of my friends felt about Don
Quixote:
it seemed to be just one episode after another and all of them very similar,
although Genji’s are amorous adventures (generally successful) rather than
knightly exploits (or farcical attempts). But much as Cervantes eventually
develops a more complicated story line, so does Murasaki, so by now I’m hooked
and read further each evening.

This
is a perfect book to fall asleep over. The story is full of gentle sighs,
delightful gardens, rain and snow and flowers and trees, and lots and lots of
beautiful sleeves. Never in my life have I read more about sleeves! There is poetry on
nearly every page, almost always couplets making allusion to earlier Japanese
poems. And you would not believe how much of the poetry mentions sleeves! When sleeves are
“wet,” as they often are, it is usually an indication that the writer was in
tears, although later in the book a footnote said it could also be – sometimes
was -- an allusion to a damaged reputation. Oh, dear!

The
women -- and girls -- with whom Genji and others fall in love frequently have
good reason to dampen their sleeves with tears. Like the marriageable young
ladies in Jane Austen’s England, the only guarantee of social security for a
female is alliance with a man of suitable rank and fortune.

...Such a difficult, constricted life as a woman was required to
live! Moving things, amusing things, she must pretend to be unaffected by them.
With whom was she to share the pleasure and beguile the tedium of this fleeting
world?

Alliance
does not always mean marriage, however, and marriage seldom means monogamy. For
one thing, polygamy is common, even expected, among the wealthy titled
families. And although divorce exists, at least once in the novel (so far) the
divorce did not take place until after the man took a second wife (wedding
and all). Also, while Genji is growing older with each chapter, his attentions
go to continually younger girls all the time, and his strategies for gaining
access to and power over these girl children are such that the author herself
cannot resist inserting the occasional sentence of judgment, e.g., “One might
have hoped that he would pursue the matter no further....”

Distasteful
as the main character’s actions can be to modern Western sensibilities
(especially feminist sensibilities), another reason Genji makes such restful
bedtime reading is that whatever in the tale might be true happened very, very
long ago, so long ago and so far away that there is nothing I can be expected
to do about it, and so I let myself enjoy the descriptions of gardens and
houses and clothing and the little line drawings on so many of the pages, taken
from woodcuts that illustrated a 1650 Japanese edition.

At
one point the emperor sends the following message to Genji:

“Cleaner,
more stately the progress of the moon

Through
regions beyond the river Katsura.”

Genji
replies:

“It is not
true to its name, this Katsura.

There is
not moon enough to dispel the mists.”

Other
references to Katsura occur from time to time throughout the book, inspiring me
to return with renewed interest to another book, a beautiful volume ofeatured
in my recent post on slipcases, Katsura: A Princely Retreat, with photographs by
Takeshi Nishikawa and text by Akira Naito.

The
story of the “princely retreat” begins four or five centuries early than the
story of Genji.

The question of when the Katsura Palace was first built devolves
upon that of when the village of Katsura came into the possession of Prince
Toshihito, and the answer to this is conjectural. ... Prince Toshihito had no
connection with the village of Katsura during Hideyoshi’s lifetime. As we shall
see, this is a point of some importance, because it refuges one of the
misleading legends concerning the origins of Katsura Palace.

Those
of us not previously
misled -- because not in possession of the legend -- may nevertheless follow
Professor Naito’s exposition with fascination. Long-ago emperors, court
intrigues, mistresses, adoptions, assassinations and other murders – how dramatic they all seem,
especially juxtaposed with the tranquility of the spare rooms and elegant
gardens of Katsura! But Japan at the beginning of its modern period, like human
history in general, was a complicated story of ongoing rivalries and
machinations. So no wonder...

Possibly to escape momentarily from the political manipulations of
the shogunate and the court, on July 20, 1616, Prince Toshihito went to
Senshõ-ji Village to “view his melons” and later “took a walk,” as the
documentary source puts it, along the Katsura River. ... The record of this
visit is the earliest suggestion of the country house that was to become the
Katsura Palace.

The
first building was apparently a small teahouse. Later building would follow,
and Naito notes that some kind of construction began on July 17, 1620, possibly
focusing more on the garden than the house. There would eventually be five
teahouses, four of which remain today.

Despite
detailed history and numerous black-and-white photographs and plans of house
and gardens, it is the color plates that set this armchair traveler dreaming.
Here is the famous Sumiyoshi Pine (said to have been a thousand years old in
Genji’s day):

Tokonoma:

Cabinets
in a dressing room:

Garden
view from one of many verandas:

Although
The Tale of Genji
is set centuries prior to the construction of the Katsura Palace, Katsura: A
PrincelyRetreat
gives me some idea of life as it was lived by wealthy, titled leisure classes
in Japan’s history, a life that certainly stands in sharp contrast to the
primitive conditions experienced by Morie and Kitako in the snow country of Japan in the middle of the 20th century. Both
an engineer and a dreamer, Morie (as you may recall) retreated farther into the
wilderness the longer he lived. Gengi, on the other hand, with little to occupy
his time other than visiting his various “ladies,” made do with exquisite
miniature landscapes around his home.

If
you were to have been born in Japan, what century would you prefer, and which way of
life? As for me, Wednesday’s blizzard served as yet another reminder, in case
one was needed, that neither Sarah-dog nor I was born to be a princess. The princely gardens are lovely, but I was born to work -- and to be outdoors as much as possible, too, snow or no snow. A life of unearned leisure is something I experience only in books.

Saturday, March 19, 2016

When
President Obama announced on March 16 his nominee to fill the vacancy on the
Supreme Court, he noted that the nominee, Judge Garland, is well known and
widely respected for (and I’ll have to paraphrase here, not having written down
the exact words) “understanding before disagreeing” and “disagreeing without
being disagreeable.” If you missed what amounted to a fully prepared speech
from the president on the occasion of his announcement, it’s worth taking time to
catch the whole thing.

I
must admit I’ve been rationing my news listening of late. So little is “new”
from one day to the next, and very little encouraging, let alone inspiring.
Listening to the president on Wednesday, however, I did feel encouraged. I
also felt proud to be an American and to have such a president in office, a man
who has had one of the most difficult jobs in the world and has endured
acrimonious hostility and partisan opposition at every turn, yet one who
continues to believe, despite its shortcomings, in our country and its form of
government and to be amodel of civility to the nation and the world. I had
been happy to read [in Rolling Stone, Oct. 2015] that he understands the
“failures” of his administration are not exclusively presidential failures. He
could and would have accomplished more with Congressional cooperation. The
Congress wouldn’t have had to cave to his every demand, either -- just have been
willing to engage constructively and compromise creatively. But “compromise”
has become a dirty word to ideologues, both those in political life and all too
many of those who elect them, Americans who have convinced themselves (or
pretend they have) that political compromise is nothing less surrender to evil.

Really?
Angels vs. Devils? Jehovah vs. Satan? Really?

In
his essay on “The Future of Tragedy,” Camus wrote that tragedy differs from
drama or melodrama in that, “the forces confronting
each other in tragedy are equally legitimate, equally justified.” This
is what makes tragedy difficult, if not impossible, to grasp in adolescence. In
high school I could only see Creon as a tyrant, Antigone as a heroine. And yet,
for the playwright and his Greek audience, the entire situation was ambiguous.
There was reason, as well as blinding passion, on both sides. Thus,

Antigone is right, but Creon is not wrong. Similarly, Prometheus is
both just and unjust, and Zeus, who pitilessly oppresses him, also has right on
his side.

Camus
gives the formula for tragedy as follows: “All can be justified, [but] no one
is just.”

And
this is beside my point, too, but as Camus understands tragedy, the present
American political scene may well be tragic, although Congress and the American
public in general lack the basic insight of the Greek playwrights and audience.
In all too many minds, we do not have tragic conflict but a morality play. If
you see where I’m coming from. But that was an aside....

Slowly,
in roundabout fashion, I am coming to my topic for the day, which is not
tragedy but rhetoric. How the two may be related (if they are) will perhaps
emerge before the end of this exploratory foray.

What is Rhetoric?

Before
agreeing or disagreeing with any social practice it’s important to get clear on
just what the practice is, so before I ask if rhetoric is good or bad, I
need to be clear on what I take the term to mean. It helps to look at the
origin of the practice. Then, does the term carry nonstandard but legitimate
meanings, or are there nonstandard but legitimate ways of understanding the
practice? Finally, has rhetoric changed (improved or degraded) over the course
of history?

So
tedious!
I know! But what is the point of speaking or writing at all, if not to
understand and be understood?

Well,
the term is Greek, and so, like tragedy, rhetoric has Western European origins.
More important in the context of present-day American politics is the fact that
rhetoric grew up alongside Greek democracy. In the fifth century BCE, when
ordinary citizens first had the opportunity to argue legal claims against other
citizens, teachers of oratory offered their services for hire. They were not
lawyers but speech coaches for citizens acting as their own lawyers. These
teachers then devised theories about what made for successful speech. Finally
philosophers got into the act, with concerns for truth and morality that went
beyond having a winning argument. Perhaps we should note that all this was
taking place in the early days of the decline of “the glory that was Greece.”

Roman
rhetoric (Romans copying everything Greek for their own purposes) broke down
the process of rhetoric into five components: analysis and research (the
marshalling of facts); arranging of the material; putting the argument into
effective language; delivering the speech (the performance); and committing its
ideas to memory (for, one presumes, future use).

Having
flowered in the Greek polis and law courts, it is hardly surprising that
rhetoric became nearly synonymous with debate. The idea that
truth emerges from adversarial verbal combat continues in our American courts
and political campaigns today.

As
Americans with differing perspectives, some of us may believe strongly in
justice and politics as competition while others hold a modified or even
entirely different view. For now, my point is simply that rhetoric and debate, like
it or not, are

1)adversarial
in nature;

2)closely
allied historically, if not almost identical; and

3)serve
a function in American society much like the function they served in ancient
Greece.

One
course required of all first-year undergraduates back when I was a freshman at
the University of Illinois was Rhetoric. In that class we learned to take and
argue for controversial positions, although, as I recall, our arguments were
handed in as written papers rather than delivered to the class as speeches, so
there was never an opposition ready to jump up with objections. The instructor,
however, assigned positions to each of us, often not the positions we
would have chosen for ourselves, and so to do the job we necessarily had not
only to give support for our assigned position but also to imagine, anticipate,
and respond to potential serious objections. That was rhetoric as it was taught
to me – not debate, as such, but the clear statement of a position and solid
supporting argument for holding the position.

This,
in fact, is how I continue to understand the term “argument” -- as a reasoned
exchange. Shouting, name-calling, high-horse refusals to explain with a
patronizing “Trust me!” – none of that is argument, as I see it. Argument
demands accepting one’s opponent as a moral equal, deserving of respect.

But
is “rhetoric,” my stalking horse, something else? Is it something more – or
(gulp!) less?

I
can’t get the question out of my head because voices on the radio keep using
the term “rhetoric” in a way to suggest that the practice is less than
desirable in the political arena – ironically, the very arena that gave it
birth. Rhetoric, they imply, is obfuscation at best, and inflammatory bombast
at its present-day worst.

Suspicions
of rhetoric are as old as rhetoric itself. John Ralston Saul, in The
Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, presents under his
heading “Sophists” the following description (his own opinions apparent in the
other bold-faced terms he defines elsewhere in his book):

SOPHISTSThe
original model for the twentieth-century TECHNOCRAT; more
precisely for the BUSINESS SCHOOL graduate and the ACADEMIC
CONSULTANT.

These
fifth-century BC teachers wandered around Greece selling their talents to
whomever would hire them. Their primary talent was rhetoric. They were not
concerned by ethics or the search for truth. Long-term consequences, indeed
reality in most forms, did not interest them. What mattered was their ability
to create illusions of reality which would permit people to get what they
wanted.

Clearly,
reservations about rhetoric today are nothing new. Back at the root of
reasoning’s public practice, rhetoric was used by the Sophists for gain, their
own as well as that of their clients, and victory was the sole relevant measure
of rhetorical quality. Serious examples of debate today (in my opinion,
American political campaign matches hardly merit the term, although they
certainly employ rhetoric), e.g., the “Oxford-style” debates we hear on public
radio, while neither monetary award nor political office is at stake, are still
concluded with winners and losers, as decided by audience vote.

Sample
question: Has religion contributed, over the course of history, more good or
evil to human society? Two teams argue, each taking a side of the question. In
the end, the audience votes for one team or the other. Truth decided by vote: a
strange Western notion.

And
there’s the sorry truth of it: outside a classroom led by a instructor with
high standards of argument, rhetoric as persuasive reasoning can include just
as many straw men, bandwagon appeals, camels’ noses, and other informal logical
fallacies as can be put over on an audience. And that’s not all. Innuendo,
empty claims, and outright falsehoods, if said with sufficient conviction and
repeated often enough, can be – and here we must sigh over having to use a
perfectly inoffensive word in such a ghastly context – effective.

Where Does That
Leave Us?

Because
argument presupposes an attempt to influence, if not an outright conflict of
opinion, it makes a lot of people uncomfortable, whether or not there’s yelling
involved. But can we imagine a human society that made no attempt to influence
the thinking of its members? Fear and force are one way to urge social
conformity. Reason, which presupposes freedom and works through argument, is
another.

But
suppose you are not comfortable with conflict, perhaps also fearful of “losing”
– what are your options if you decline to engage in debate?

Here’s
one possibility: Refuse to listen. Walk away. Get on your high horse and take
what you see as the high road. Follow the example of Senate Republicans, who
say to the president, “We don’t care who you nominate for the Supreme Court. We
will not meet with your nominee, and we will not hold hearings.”

Am
I the only one reminded by this strategy of fifth-grade girls? “Come on, let’s
walk away. We’ll just ignore her!” Did we really elect people to Congress to
play this game instead of doing their job? Well, perhaps we can be thankful
Senate Republicans are not acting like fifth-grade boys, slugging it out
(wordlessly, of course) on the playground after school!

Other
options?

Sometimes
people are yelling because they think no one is listening. Listening could be a
course of action taken in place of debate. I say “in place of” deliberately,
because although in a true debate only one person can speak at a time, we have
all seen the others making notes and preparing their rebuttal during the other
side’s speeches. Understanding is not the goal in debate, much less working
together – only “winning.”

I’ve
said that reason -- that is, argument -- demands and presupposes freedom and
equality. I’m thinking now about listening and wondering what, if anything, it
presupposes. There is, unfortunately, a frequent perception, shared by speaker
and listener, that the speaker is in a superior, one-up position (see Tannen
reference at the bottom of this post). Can a listener take a different
perspective on the relationship? If so, might the speaker’s perception also
shift? Not necessarily. But possibly?

I
haven’t found a wide, clear path yet but am searching through the forest.

Judge
Garland’s way, as President Obama characterized it, of “understanding before
disagreeing” tells me that the judge must be a good listener. I can
psychologize and/or demonize an opponent, based on his or her positions, but I
can’t understand the reasoning that led to those positions unless (1) the other
person is willing to explain his or her reasoning, and (2) I am willing to
listen. Possibilities that follow listening are multiple rather than binary:

oI
may find I agree with the speaker, after all. Perhaps we were simply using
different language and not realizing we were aiming in the same direction.

oI
may agree with some of the speaker’s reasons but don’t see that they entail the
conclusion the speaker has drawn. Maybe we can talk this through together.

oOur
positions may be incompatible but not marked by enormous pragmatic distance.
Perhaps we can each move a little closer.

oI
disagree more strongly than ever and now understand more clearly where our
disagreement lies. Understanding allows me to aim my own explanation to the
heart of the matter, in hopes of changing the speaker’s mind or modifying her
or his position.

oI
might change my
mind!

These
are possibilities that immediately occur to me, not a list I see as exhaustive.
Do you see other possible outcomes?

Maybe,
as Bergson says of the future, the path to bring us together isn’t lying
somewhere in the woods, waiting for us to stumble upon it. Maybe we have to
clear that path ourselves.

As
for the Senate blocking the President’s nominee for the Supreme Court, the
following idea comes from my friend Michael Roth:

"Recent history suggests there
are no adverse consequences for this style of political maneuvering. So perhaps
an alternate form of questioning might be to investigate what the opposition's
options are.

"Suppose the president could
get a federal court somewhere to find that the submitting the name is
sufficient for fulfilling his constitutional duty and since the Senate has
chosen not to weigh in, he can go ahead an seat his nominee.

"The senate might then chose to
appeal this to the supreme court. Assuming the appeal results in a 4-4 tie, the
lower court's ruling would hold and the Justice would be seated.

"Is that possible. What are the next steps for getting it
done?"

That
Michael! He was definitely one of the smartest of our graduate school
philosophy cohort!

Suggested reading: The Argument Culture: Working from Debate to Dialogue, by Deborah Tannen; The
Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, by John Ralston Saul

Thursday, March 17, 2016

No,
not now, it isn’t. And it was not a record-breaking winter, either, in terms of
cold or snowfall. But the most ordinary mild winter still leaves plenty of
cracked stones behind, and as spring approaches, wind and rain conspire to keep
a walker’s head down and eyes on the ground, which is the perfect way to spot
Petoskey stones on the side of the road, far from the beach. Remember, at one
time all of Leelanau County was underwater, so coral fossils can be found
anywhere.

Some
stones, albeit dry or dirty, exhibit a certain look that says, “Pick me
up!” So you stop, pick it up and turn it over, and damp spots on the underside
reveal what had been hidden when the stone was “face-down” in the dirt. You
take it home and rinse it in clean water, and you feel happy. You have
connected with ages past.

Now,
quick: Why is a book cover like a stone on the ground?

My
general advice to anyone contemplating book cover design is that the cover has
to say, “Pick me up!” in a loud, clear voice. Then, when a browser opens the
book in hand, what’s inside has to say, “Don’t put me down! Take me home!” In addition, one of the rewards of books can be connection to other worlds, far from us in time and space.

And so, because spring is on the way, on Wednesday (St. Patrick’s Eve) I got busy with general cleaning and rearranging at Dog Ears Books, my aim to have the whole place say, to anyone who comes in the door, “Slow down. Take your time. Explore. And pick up treasures to take home.”

As
for my own reading, am still caught up in the essays of Camus and still falling
asleep each night over The Tale of Genji, but it’s thrilling to get outdoors
again, too, for longer and longer walks, as the last of the snow disappears
from woods and fields. Back roads are great. Cross-country even better.

Monday, March 14, 2016

I'll ask you to picture most of today's post in your mind, as I have no decent photographs of my coyote encounters and went out walking without my camera on Sunday morning.

Coyotes are common in our
area, though they were less so in the past of living memory. Deer are more
common, too, than they used to be. If it seems a paradox – wildlife increasing
along with suburban-type spread – think of all the new lawns and gardens carved
out of former forest as a never-empty buffet table spread for wild deer. Is it
any wonder they approach the houses? And with the deer come their predators.

In general, of course, there
is more wildlife around us than we ever see. Few people in Michigan have ever
seen a vole, and yet it is the most common mammal (woodland and meadow) in the
state. I have only seen two – and neither for more than half a minute, if that.
Fuller and rounder in body than a field mouse, with a pudgy little face, the
vole is as shy as a Borrower. Caught out in the open, seen, he is seized by panic and cannot disappear fast
enough. Yet when we go walking in the country we are strolling over countless vole highways.

The presence of larger
mammals such deer and coyotes, is more obvious. It’s a rare walk along a dirt
road that fails to turn up deer tracks or coyote scat. Deep, sharply outlined
hoofprints with sand and dust thrown up tell you that deer ran across the road
very recently. How many were there? Were they being pursued, or did they scent
your approach? That greyish coyote scat is old, not from this morning. Later in
the summer fresh scat will usually contain (and it’s surprising when you see
this for the first time) cherry pits, but fresh cherries are a long way off in
mid-March. This is scanty scat. Was it a young coyote or only a very hungry
one?

Along a line of giant old
pines, trees collaborating with the wind off the lake to produce a symphony,
nature’s power their theme, on the ground between the pines and first row of
cherry trees lies half a deer leg. Bent delicately at what would be called the
ankle if this were a human leg, the hoof is a healthy black, fur still intact,
while above the joint the bone is almost completely exposed. Only a few shreds
of red meat remain. And yet, though the remainder of the carcass is nowhere in
sight, this tattered, bloody remnant manages to project the spirit of the
living deer. Before death came life.

These are the signs. This is
the drama of prey and predator, of nature red in tooth and claw but, for all
that running and killing, animals only doing what they must to survive. Hatred
has no part of this drama, which is not a question of war or demonization. And
so, even a scene of carnage carries a sense of peace. Somewhere nearby are pups
with warm, fat, full bellies, and soon there will be new fawns born.

At night the coyote chorus
seems gathered beneath the bedroom window to serenade us. They sound closer
than they are, but in the early morning, from an east-facing window, it is not
uncommon to see a lone coyote making its way back through the orchard from the
creek, returning to a den along the edge of the woods. A den, like tracks and
scat, can be read as active or abandoned, according to the freshness around the
opening, although giving any den a wide berth is never a mistake. One animal
might have dug it last year and another taken it over for winter quarters.

Human beings rarely surprise
wild animals attuned by necessity to everything going on around them, but once
a coyote and I surprised each other. It was on an old cleared lane through the
woods, a lane that descended into old woods from higher cleared ground, tilled
fields, and my dog was still behind me, up on that open, higher ground. Since
on our walks together she never allows herself to be left behind, I went alone
down into the woods, confident that she would follow in her own good time. And
there coming toward me in that wide, open, clear green swathe cut through the
woods, expecting me as little as I had expected him, trotted a confident young
coyote. We both stopped and faced each other silently, watchfully, unmoving,
across the distance separating us. Then, as if by mutual consent, each of us
turned back to go the way we had come.Regaining the high ground, I went another way with my dog that day.
Where the coyote went or what he did was his business.

I have seen other coyotes,
and one other time the animal stared at me. It was on a hill just past our
barn, in winter. Sarah was a puppy, new to our household, and for some reason I
had taken her out on a leash that morning. She was fascinated by the coyote
that looked through us with its blank, wild stare, standing its ground. I waved
my arms and yelled at it to leave but had to take a few running steps to goad
the animal into a gentle, reluctant, loping retreat, frequently interrupted by
halts and backward glances.

Sarah was young then, and we
had conversations with friends and veterinarians about dog vs. wild encounters.
“Wild always wins” was the chilling verdict from one vet. Now, as then, I
prefer the words of cowboy poet Max Black’s “Ode to a Border Collie,” which
states that the border collie “makes coyotes tremble.” Sarah is a mix of border
collie and Australian shepherd, and she’s grown into a big girl.

Not that I wish the coyotes
bad luck with their hunting. I just don’t want them messin’ with us, and so far
they have not. Peaceful coexistence is close enough.

Thursday, March 10, 2016

...I can step my memory onto the backs of the big boulders and hear
my boots scuff against the black and rust and corn-yellow lichens that covered
them.

When I was a boy ... I lived on the largest block of unfenced
wilderness in the forty-eight states.

-Mark
Spragg, Where Rivers Change Direction

As
a bookseller who started out (back in 1993) exclusively with used stock, I
still gravitate heavily in that serendipitous direction, ready for a previously
overlooked or treasure somehow previously missed to take me by surprise. I also
maintain that certain words grant magic to a book title. “Rivers” is one of
those words. And so it I saw and picked up Mark Spragg’s book. Turning it over,
I saw a sentence fragment, “... wrangles horses for his taciturn father,...”
and had to start reading. It had me at “Hello.”

I
knew that David would enjoy the setting as well as the writing, so I tried
reading aloud to him from the first chapter. I didn’t get very far. He was
fully attentive. The problem was that I simply could not pronounce aloud, with
a steady voice, sentences that had such a powerful effect on me as these:

I knew the horses as I knew my family. ... We caught them, used
them, turned them back into the kidney-warm manure cake of the corrals, into
the ridden-to-dust round corral. They rolled and stood and shook and milled.
When I was separated from them I felt wrong in the world. When I was separated
from them I took no comfort in the sound of the creek. I felt chilled without
the heat of them. ...

The
ranch life is a beautiful but also hard, even brutal. Much of what might sound
like “hardship” was intentional, since the family business is a dude ranch in
the Yellowstone Plateau, with clients looking to “get away” from civilization.
Thus --

No one ever asked why we had no television, no daily paper. They
came for what my brother and I took for granted. They came to live the
anachronism that we considered our normal lives.

But
much larger difficulties, privations, and challenges come with the territory,
unsought. At least half the chapters are what a friend of mine (who speaks of
certain movies she recommends as “hard to watch”) might call “hard to read.” I
winced through much of the chapter titled “Bones,” in which thirteen-year-old
Mark accompanies one of the older ranch hands, John, on an overnight hunting
expedition for winter meat, looking for an elk to kill. They find and kill the
elk, but early in the butchering process John’s hand is badly cut. The
description is graphic enough that I won’t quote it but will just say that for
most of the chapter that mutilated hand hangs in the balance. And that’s early
on, with much more to come.

A
gentler chapter is “Wapiti School.” The school is named for the valley, green
only two months of the year, the valley where, scattered far from one another,
some two dozen ranching households form a kind of extended family.

America was not yet rich enough for the coastal populations to buy
up the hinterland and subdivide it into a patchwork of second homes. The Wapiti
ranchers worked their land; they did not sell it. It was a life that lined the
face, leaned the body, and satisfied. We knew our neighbors.

School
days bring the author to his first shy boyhood venturings into the agonizing
mysteries of love. He strives to tame his cowlicks and buys his first gift for
a girl, but how to declare his feelings?

Then
there is my favorite chapter, “Greybull,” the story of the boy’s first trip to
the livestock auction, an hour beyond Cody, outside Greybull (population: 12),
a trip made with his father in their old truck with the busted radio.

The parking lot is gravel, rutted from a recent rain, grown up at
the edges in tire-broken weeds. The pickups are mud splattered, most of them
hitched to trailers, their grills and windshields uneven fields of smeared
insect body. There is a row of stock trucks. A semi is backed to a loading
chute.

In
one of the pens, a horse catches the boy’s eye,

... a single dun gelding. His mane and tail, muzzle, and stockings
darkened as deeply brown as wet earth. So is the line that dissects his back,
from his mane to the base of his tail. His ears are pricked. His face alive
with intelligence. He’s well muscled and put together like a cutter.

The
boy has eighty-nine dollars in his pocket, a fat, damp roll mostly of
one-dollar bills. Reading this chapter, the reader fears not that someone or
something might die, only that the boy might not be able to buy the horse.

(“Only”? Did I say “only”? I was in a fever of
excitement reading this chapter, excitement similar to my grandfather’s, so
long ago, as he read for himself, at my urging, one of my favorite books, The
Black Stallion’s Filly, by Walter Farley. When he reached the chapter of the
Kentucky Derby chapter, my grandfather gripped the book more tightly and beads
of sweat popped out on his forehead.)

With
Spragg’s book in hand, we know the young boy in the stories will grow up to be
a writer and that he will be living back in Wyoming when this book is
published. But that road away from the ranch and into the future was not an
easy ride. A winter of mountain isolation following college was easier for me
to understand than a later sojourn in town, both measured against the backdrop
of a wilderness boyhood. His parents’ divorce, reported without explanation,
struck me as unutterably sad, and his mother’s death was wrenching. But more
than that -- the young boy’s openness to the world and everything in it, his
early life with horses, hard and sometimes brutal as that wilderness life could
be -- I wanted to turn back time.

In
the end, Spragg writes that he fears having lived “a careless life.” I read
those words and wonder – asking myself -- does he have horses now? Is it
possible to – can
anyone -- live a “careless life” with horses?

I
claim no objectivity whatsoever for my post today. “When
I was separated from [horses] I felt wrong in the world.” I am riveted
by that sentence.SinceI have been separated from horses all my life, except for whatever
stolen hours I could find to be near them, seeking them out, I can’t help
wondering how I would have felt in the world if my girlhood horse dream had
come true or if, later, I hadn’t allowed myself to be sidetracked away from
horses, again and again, by other shiny, glittery objects along the way.

But
I should clarify: It is not necessary to be “horse-crazy” to appreciate Where
Rivers Change Direction. Don’t expect a series of pretty postcards, that’s all:
nature’s power would be cruel if not so completely indifferent. But if you
can’t get yourself out to Yellowstone, read this book and you will be well
rewarded, seeing things in your reading mind’s eye that you would never see out
your car windows. If you’ve been to the wilderness, Yellowstone or any other,
you’ll enjoy reliving the freedom of these open spaces.

Spragg’s
writing is mesmerizing. The wilderness he experienced half a
century ago, beautiful and brutal, makes for a compelling story, and the author's shortest,
simplest sentences carry emotion and poetry. I highly recommend this unusual,
startling, and vivid memoir. I have copies in stock. Come see me soon.

Horses shown today were photographed in Cochise County, Arizona, in early 2015.

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

This
book was not exactly what I expected. It was what I expected and much more.

I
knew it would begin, “Mama’s still alive today,” announcing at the outset the
contrast between this book and the classic twentieth-century French novel, and
I knew some of what would appear in the story, such as --

The word “Arab” appears [in the book narrated by the character of
Mersault] twenty-five times, but not a single name, not once.

That
much I had read in several reviews. I understood that Daoud had written another
version of The Stranger, had written about the fictional murder and its
consequences as experienced not by the killer but by the victim’s family, and
so the deep grief and implacable resentment of the surviving brother, narrator
of this new story, was hardly unexpected.

Daoud’s
narrator, Harun, is an old man recounting his story in a bar to a stranger,
compulsively digressing and repeating himself as he speaks of his brother, his
brother’s death, and the years that followed. I cannot say “as he remembers”
these things, because he has been living over and over them for decades, the
past more real to him than the present, memories more present than the flow of
life. In a very real sense, he has had no life since his brother was killed but
has been forced by his mother to live as his brother’s ghost.

Born
in an occupied land, Harun was a child in the days of colonial power, and so we
expect that the theme of colonialism will play a part, understanding that this
story is being told from “the other side.”

He was Musa to us, his family, his neighbors, but it was enough for
him to venture a few meters into the French part of the city, a single glance
from one of them was enough, to make him lose everything, starting with his
name....

There
is a mother, and there are originally two sons, but the father disappeared from
the family so long ago that he is little more than a name to Harun – and not
much of a name at that.

Everything revolved around Musa, and Musa revolved around our
father, whom I never knew and who left me nothing but our family name. Do you
know what we were called in those days? Uled el-assas, the sons
of the guardian. Of the watchman, to be more precise.

It
was the way families were identified in those days.

Before
I go further, I want to pause and speak of the writing itself. The controlled
power is stunning.

The sun was overwhelming, like a heavenly accusation. It shattered
into needles on the sand and on the sea but never flagged.

Or
this:

It was a heavy old revolver that looked like a metal dog with one
nostril and gave off a strange odor. I remember its weight that night, not
pulling me down to earth but toward some obscure target.

A
reader reaches hungrily from the end of one sentence to the beginning of the
next, captivated and enthralled.

What
I was surprised to find in the narrator of The Mersault Investigation was a man every bit
as alienated from himself and society as was Camus’s Mersault. Harun wonders
how two people in this world can ever love each other, when all are ”born alone
and will die separate.” Life is absurd; therefore, Harun believes only in death.
“All the rest is nothing but rituals, habits, and dubious bonding.” Like
Mersault, Harun is an outsider, a stranger.

A stranger possesses nothing—and I was one. I’ve never held
anything in my hands very long, I start to feel revulsion for it, I have the
sensation of excessive weight.

The
likenesses continue. Like Mersault, Harun rejects religion, belief in God, and
conformity to social conventions. The scene he recounts of his violent rage at
the imam who would pray for him is a direct counterpart of the prison cell
scene between Mersault and the priest who comes to hear his confession. After
he has killed the Frenchman, Harun longs to be punished for his crime and
identifies with Mersault’s desire to be hated by the crowd he imagines at his
execution. Those expressions of hatred, finally, would grant his life meaning.

There
is a parallel in their crimes and also in the way society interprets their
guilt. Mersault took the life of an Arab, Mersault the life of a Frenchman, but
Mersault was convicted of failing to mourn his mother’s death properly and
Harun accused for not having joined the fighters for Algerian independence.

The
list could go on.

For
all their similarities, however, the two characters are two opposite sides of a
coin, distinct and different, rather than mirror images. Harun is telling his
story to correct the absence of his brother in Mersault’s story, to bring his
brother back to life, in the sense of restoring him to history with a name.
Harun tells his listener (and us, his readers) early in the book that what he
wants is justice.

I think I’d just like justice to be done. That may seem ridiculous
at my age...But I swear it’s true. I don’t mean the justice of the courts, I
mean the justice that comes when the scales are balanced.

When
he kills the Frenchman, Harun briefly feels the scales have been balanced, but
his sense of relief and justice is short-lived. He is given no trial, set free
without punishment, not even officially charged with murder. He has gained no
notoriety. Worse, his brother’s name is still unknown, while Mersault, also
dead, is world-famous.

Which
brings us around to the original story, narrated by a character named Mersault,
the famous novel that serves as the springboard for this brilliant new novel.
Daoud deals with Camus in a manner audacious and breathtaking. He treats the
fictional Mersault, a literary device, not only as the first-person narrator
but also as the author of The Stranger --and the “famous book” itself is never mentioned by its title, any more
than there is mention of the writer Albert Camus.

Harun
speaks of Mersault and the book he wrote,

If only your hero had been content with bragging, without going so
far as to write a book! There were thousands like him back then, but it was his
talent that made his crime perfect.

As
Hurun tells the story, Mersault not only killed Musa but also wrote the
book
that became world-famous, the book in which Musa’s name and everything else
about him have been left out, the book in which Musa is “the Arab,” twenty-five
times, but always nameless.

Judging from your enthusiasm, the book’s success is still
undiminished, but I repeat, I think it’s an awful swindle.

The
book was, in Harun’s eyes, Meursault’s second crime, although he is fascinated
by the criminal with whom he shares so many qualities.

Read what your hero wrote about his stay in a prison cell. I often
reread that passage myself. It’s the most interesting part of his whole
hodgepodge of sun and salt. When your hero’s in his cell, that’s when he’s best
at asking the big questions.

Drawn
in spite of himself to the original outsider’s philosophy, sharing so much of
his view of life, Harun continues to recoil from Meursault’s colonial
blindness.

Do you understand why I laughed the first time I read your hero’s
book? There I was, expecting to find my brother’s last words between those
covers, the description of his breathing, his features, his face, his answers
to his murderer....

Now,
when Harun tells the story, in Daoud’s novel, it is Camus the writer who has
been erased, blended into the character he created. The book’s title is just as
thoroughly omitted. There was no Musa in The Stranger? There is no Camus in
The Meursault Investigation. “Not once.”

Under
colonialism, colonizers and colonized alike suffer from alienation and the
corrosive effects of man’s injustice to man. In these two novels, neither
fictional outsider narrator Meursault nor fictional outsider narrator Harun
expects or receives understanding or justice. But Meursault has at least been
visible to the larger world, in retrospect, thanks to the talent of the writer
Camus, while Harun, his brother Zusa, and all their family have all been
without names, as if without existence. Until now.

It
is unlikely that the name of Camus will vanish from world literature any time
soon, and I doubt Kamel Daoud would even wish for its disappearance. Surely
Daoud and Camus, were they able to meet, would express appreciation of one
another’s talent and vision, just as Mersault and Harun would recognize in each
other many mutual philosophical affinities. And yet, isn’t the erasure of
Camus from the history of his own novel, in the end, a triumphant literary
balancing of the scales at last?

Camus
is one of my heroes, and, as I have written very recently, Camus was not Mersault. Camus was not deaf and blind to Algerian suffering –
quite the contrary. I think, however, that he would have been among the first
to understand and admire and recommend this new version of the story and that
he would have recommended it in the name of justice, as well as in the name of
art.

Were
she still alive today, instead of having died at age 30, my friend Annie would
have been 53 years old on March 14, and I can see clearly another version of
reality, one that finds Annie once again in front of a classroom, her topic
again ‘alterity’ – i.e., otherness, her reading assignment this week Kamel
Daoud’s The Mersault Connection. How Annie would have loved this book! How I
wish we could sit down and talk about it together! Annie, dear, today’s post is
for you!